An interview with Marco Taradash
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This interview was delivered during a meeting between Marco Taradash, member of the European Parliament, and several pupils of the Police Academy of Budapest who intend to specialize in the drug problem.
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Q: What is the political context of the drug problem in our societies?
A: Drug policy has become one of the fundamental components of the domestic and international policies of all the countries of the world. We can already estimate the consequences of this in the every day life of the citizens of E.C. Europe as well as of the United States and of other large nations. The effects of a policy based on the penal repression of drug abuse and drug traffic has caused a damage which is in itself much greater than the damage caused by drugs on health.
Q: What are the consequences of this prohibition, of this state of illegality for drugs?
A: Today, the consequence of having prohibited without being capable of preventing abuse is that, along with an uncontrollable surge of drug abuse, there has also been a tide of crime in our cities, and an increase of the diseases connected to certain uses of drugs, such as AIDS. The latter, which is caused by needle sharing among addicts, is a direct consequence of the state of illegality of this type of abuse, and has enabled organized crime to thrive and to reach levels of power and wealth that no government and no police can control. Often, politicians charge the police with tasks which they have been incapable of solving in other ways. But often, such problems are practically unsolvable when they are passed on to the police forces. The problem of drugs is one of such problems. The claim of eliminating the use of certain substances from the earth has created a rich and thriving market, and peddling prohibited drugs today means growing rich easily and quickly.
Q: All this concerns traffickers. In your opinion, what are the consequences of prohibited drugs on consumers?
A: In practice, using prohibited drugs means becoming a criminal, in that drug addicts are forced to commit all sorts of offences to get the money necessary to sustain their habits. They are forced to steal, to snatch bags, to commit robberies or even murders, to sell more drugs or to prostitute, etc. A few examples: according to a government report of January 1991, in the United States 9 million violent offences connected to the drug trade are committed every year, with a huge social damage, $35 billion, which corresponds to the damage relative to the activities of drug consumers who commit violences. According to U.N. reports, year after year, the traffic moves and invades countries that were unaffected by it until then. In the United States, for example, cocaine moved very rapidly toward continental Europe, toward the European Community. What I mean to say is that other forms of drugs have invaded bordering countries from E.C. Europe. Latin America was flooded by coca leave derivatives very quickly. And t
he trade passes through all the countries of the world. In Western countries, we suffer the damage of this policy. We have not succeeded in blocking drug abuse, while we have created an organized crime which threatens democracy in the countries of Western Europe and especially in the weaker countries, such as the countries of Central and Latin America.
Q: How do you judge the situation in Central European countries, and therefore of Hungary in this context?
A: The risk for the newly democratized countries such as Hungary is creating something similar to what occurred in the American continent, where the countries with the most fragile social and economic structure, the countries of Central America for example, have become the ideal base for drug traffickers. The risk is high. Hungary, like Czechoslovakia and similar countries, could become for the European Community that which Columbia and Bolivia are for the United States. At that point, nothing could be done. Hungary is a country that needs money, and cannot be too choosy about the origin of this money. The same thing happened already in Spain, after the dictatorship, where among the capitals flowing to the new Spanish democracy there were the capitals of the major Western industries, but also of the major organizations of traffickers of Europe or of Latin America or of Northern America. The same thing could happen in countries such as Hungary.
Q: How would you judge the situation of the police in these countries?
A. In weak, low-income countries, the police are constantly blackmailed: on the one side there is the risk and the threat of being killed (and a great many police officers have fallen victims, in all the countries of the world, to the drug traffickers), on the other side there is the risk of corruption, and the latter risk is equally strong, because in poor countries, where salaries are low, traffickers can always offer sums that are extremely inviting from an economic point of view.
Q: What is your idea of a possible "solution"?
A: Today we must create a political alternative to this kind of situation; such solution must be international, and cannot be implemented in one country only. In fact, the effect of prohibiting drugs has been that of creating criminal organizations that have had no limits to their expansion, and today no commodity is perhaps "freer" than cocaine or heroin in Western markets. Such drugs can be found everywhere, at any hour of the day or of the night. And there is not one chance of blocking this market, because even if prisons are filled with criminals (in the U.S., over one million people end up in jail each year for offences related to the drug abuse and sale) and even if countless peddlers are arrested, the sale cannot be checked. Drug abuse has risen steadily over the past years. The only way to block this type of crime is to eliminate the profit coming from the sale of drugs. That is, to put these products under the control of the State, so that they may be sold with strict criteria and with equally stric
t quality controls. This solution is possible: requests in this sense come from many major European cities, such as Frankfurt, Hamburg, Liverpool, Amsterdam, Zürich, Athens and many others. And it is a request that must come also from countries like Hungary and from police forces, following the example of police unions in Germany and Spain, for example.
Q: Practically speaking, what are the measures you have taken?
A: We have established an International Antiprohibitionist League, founded with the contribution of the Radical Party, but which is not linked to any party and includes operators of over twenty countries in three continents. Among them there are magistrates, jurists, economists, physicians, police officers; people who know what the reality is like and have understood that it is not possible to defend ourselves from the drug problem if not in terms of health policy and social policy. The moment we believe we can solve the problem by means of repression, we are adding a problem related to public order and political corruption to the medical problem of drug abuse, thus making it virtually impossible to tackle abuse and reduce it effectively. This is why we are operating in many countries of the world, to achieve a new international regulation to be submitted to the United Nations, making it possible, in the near future, to eliminate all the (tremendous) damages caused by the different laws on drugs.
